Some 16,000 assorted sex offenders, parolees and other convicts across the US were left unmonitored for 12 hours last week, because the monitoring firm's database exceeded a 2.1 billion record threshold.
The tagging system was run by BI Incorporated of Boulder, Colorado, and is called the BI Total Access Server. What should …

Numbers

We are all suspects.

The 'one trillion' is one hell of a lot of forward planning - the database must be designed by some of those fundamentalists (with the emphasis on 'mental') who are 'led by god' (and the even mighter dollar).

Rubbish

So they hit the max value of a field that could hold a 31-bit value with, presumably one bit for the sign.

That's not "very unusual" - it's exactly what you'd expect when you run out of space to store values. I see that Len Silverstone markets himself as having over 23 years experience and so I would expect to have met this problem many times before, especially in days when databases typically allowed for 8-bit and 16-bit values to be defined.

"Very difficult to reach [this problem]..."?? Errr not really, try and write one more record to a table that has the maximum number of rows in.

"... working with Microsoft to develop a warning system on thresholds..." - that's right, try to deflect the blame onto some supposed deficiency by someone else. A simple "SELECT MAX(xxx)..." would have sufficed to give warning.